I worked at the Worcester College of Higher Education and the Universities of Keele, York, Lancaster and Manchester before joining the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths. I’ve worked in the areas of Women’s Studies and Cultural Studies as well as Sociology.

My research interests consolidate around the issue of value and values. How do we know what value and values are? What do they do? I only realized this was my central concern recently when I was asked to summarise my work and noticed that all my research has been framed around these issues. Hence value/s has led me through issues of respectability in class and gender formation, an exploration of symbolic value through media and cultural formations; using feminist and poststructuralist theory, Pierre Bourdieu and to the economic abstractions of Marx, to help me understand. I’m still working on this topic (it is my life’s work), currently attempting to understand how value moves on, through and with people as they live the imperatives of exchange in capitalism. But, more significantly, what remains beyond exchange? What matters to people? How do they formulate value/s beyond economic perceptions? I have been developing the idea of ‘person value’ through ‘value struggles’ to understand how different forms of de/valued personhood are lived.

In July 2011 I became the joint managing editor of the journal The Sociological Review, a major journal which has just celebrated 100 years of shaping the field. I’m incredibly proud to make a small intervention into its illustrious history.

Academic qualifications

I am delighted to have been awarded the following honours:

Elected, Academician of the Academy of the Learned Socities for the Social Sciences (from 2003-)

Honorary Doctorate, University of Teesside (from October 2012-). My home town.

Areas of supervision

Postgraduate Supervision

I’ve supervised a range of students of whom I’m really proud. PhD students are the future of sociology.

ESRC Funded Students:

Anne Cronin ‘Cultural Consumption: Comparative Studies of France and the UK (1994-1998). Now a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University. The PhD became the great book Advertising and Consumer Citizenship: Gender, Images and Rights, London & New York: Routledge. (with Celia Lury)

Breda Gray ‘ Irish Women and the Diaspora’ (1994-1998). Now a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the university of Limerick. The PhD became Women and the Irish Diaspora, London and New York: Routledge. (with Jackie Stacey)

Diane Railton ‘Young Women and Musical Appreciation’ (1995-1999). Now Senior Lecturer in Sociology of the Media at the University of Teeside. The PhD became Music Video and the Politics of Representation. Edinburgh University Press.

Jocey Quinn ‘ Widening Participation: Women Returner’s Experiences of Higher Education’ (1996-1999). Now Professor of Education, School of Partnership, Enterprise & Professional Studies, University of Plymouth. Her most recent book is Learning Communities and Imagined Social Capital, London: Continuum (with Rosemary Deem)

Lewis Turner (1999- transfer) ‘Gender Renaissance: Re-configurations of femininity (2004). Now an independent researcher and stakeholder consultant for Lancashire Constabulary and the Crown Prosecution Service on trans issue, published with Stephen Whittle ''Sex Changes'? Paradigm Shifts in 'Sex' and 'Gender' Following the Gender Recognition Act? In Sociological Research Online, Volume 12, Issue 1.

Anneke Meyer ‘Discourses of Pedophilia’ (2001- 2004). Now Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her PhD was published as Meyer, A. (2007) The Child at Risk: Paedophiles, Media Responses and Public Opinion. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Danielle Griffiths ‘Intimacy on Television’ (2001- 2006). Now research associate in the School of Law, University of Manchester. Has published her PhD in journal articles. (with Lisa Adkins)

Debbie Fallon (2004-10 pt) ‘ A Feminist Analysis of Young Women Accessing Post-Coital Contraception’. Still working at Salford University.

Emma Jackson (2005-2010) Young Homeless People and Urban Space: Dis/placements, Mobilities and Fixity . Was a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant working on an ESRC-ANR funded project exploring the relationship between the middle classes and the city in Paris and London and now holds a postdoctoral position in Urban Studies at Glasgow (supervised with Les Back)

Mike Leary (2004-2010 part-time) Representations of Space and the Space of Representation: A Lefebrvian analysis of Castlefield, Manchester. (with Michael Keith). published as The Production of Urban Public Space: international comparisons, Policy Press, Bristol Urban Regeneration from a Global Perspective. Mike teaches urban planning at Southbank University.

Christy Kulz ‘Structure Liberates: making subjects for the future in a London Secondary School’ (2008-2012)(with Kirsty Campbell)

Television and video output

Radio

February 2012 - listen HERE to a podcast of Beverley Skeggs being interviewed about her research on BBC Radio 4

Research interests

Research Projects:

PhD 1980-1986: An Ethnographic Study of Young Women and Their Experience of Caring Further Education Using Further Education as an institutional foci and tracing movement through broader cultural spaces it explored how young, white, working class women became implicated in the construction of their own subjectivities in relation to wider structures of class and gender. Drawing from the theories of Bourdieu, Gramsci, Genovese and Foucault, the study demonstrated how, in this process, they implicate themselves in subordination and self-surveillance and also provide free caring labour in areas where state provision was cut. (SSRC funded)

1983-1984: The Educational and Vocational Choice of School Leavers . This research produced a data bank by monitoring and recording the qualifications and labour market choices of all sixteen -year old school pupils in Cheshire. Use was made of SPSS computation through IBM mainframes. (ESRC funded £84,000)

April 1988 July 1988: Multi-Ethnic Needs in Hereford and Worcester Part One . This involved interviewing all managers and department heads in Hereford and Worcester Further Education Colleges to estimate the form and type of racism in existence in college in order to develop staff training programmes to fit local requirements. (LEA/GRIST funded: £26,000)

Sept. 1988-Nov. 1988: Follow-up study to doctoral research . This traced the eighty -three young women studied for the PhD, to develop theories of sexuality and explore the influences of popular culture upon familial and employment decisions. (GRIST £7,500)

Nov. 1988-April 1989: Multi-Ethnic Educational Needs in Hereford and Worcester Part Two . This identified the needs of black students in Hereford and Worcester Further Education Colleges. Firstly, to inform the design and provision of staff development courses. Secondly, to establish a county network for the incorporation of this research in the review and design of curriculum materials. (LEA/GRIST £26,000)

July - Dec. 1991: Sexual Awareness Amongst Young People in the North East . Using innovative research methods, such as popular cultural questionnaires, and intensive interviewing with a sampled group of 16-24 year old young people, it generated issue understanding that was used to develop training materials for Further Education staff development on HIV/AIDS awareness. (Health Authority funded: £6,500)

April, May, September 1992 : Women, 'Race' & Resistance in Music. In New York, London, LA, Manchester. Interviewed performers and powerful women in the music industry to identify the sites, places and motivations for the production of popular feminism.

May - August 1997: Sexual Citizenship: Space, Consumption, Law. Seedcorn funding IWS Lancaster University (with Les Moran and Carole Truman). This research generated pilot data for the following ESRC research proposal. It used three different focus groups (Lesbians, gay men and heterosexual women to generate an issue based understanding of homophobic violence and the production of safer-space (Institute for Women's Studies £2,000)

May 1998- 2001: ESRC (L133251031) Violence, Sexuality, Space: A Study of the Practical and Policy Context of Sustainable Safe Public Places: (Principal Investigator, with Les Moran). The study explores how safer places are generated and maintained for three different groups (gay men, lesbians and heterosexual women) in two different geographical locations (Manchester and Lancaster). It uses multi methods and has generated innovative methods of feedback of research results to interested stakeholder groups, policy makers and community organizations. (ESRC £143,000)

June 1999- Jan 2000: Representations of Smokers (Seedcorn funding, Faculty of Social Science, Lancaster University (with Professor Hilary Graham). A literature search and review of the state of research on smoking. This included all health promotion literature alongside TV and media representations. (FSS, £1,000)

February 2003- Regenerating Communities through Radio: A case study of Radio Regen

(funded by Manchester City Council + European Social Fund). The study involved 3 stages. The first is an organizational evaluation, examining work culture and how this impacts upon training policy and stations output. The second examined training and volunteers and the third was a community evaluation to understand how both the former two stages of analysis can be used to understand the impact of the Radio stations on their local community.

January 2007 – July 2007 CRESC Contingencies of Value (ESRC Centre for Social and Cultural Change small grant 10k) to study what matters to people who are beyond the normative understandings of exchange value personhood. Three groups were interviewed: ex-offenders, a group of older women +80 and a group of young mothers to examine what matters when investments either previously made, not made or impossible to make do not generate attachments to future participation in society.

This is a project about how identities based on class (with gender and race) are shaped by the ethical scenarios offered by television. The research explores how televisual texts mediate subjectivity by showing how class is currently produced through different methods for self-making. Whilst many social commentators promote and predict the demise of class, our prior research suggests that class is not declining at all but is instead made differently, in ways that have not yet been fully identified. It is the purpose of this project to identify these new ways of making class. (with Dr Helen Wood, Manchester and Nancy Thumim, researcher Oct 2005-April 2007)

There has been a great deal of interest in how capital has intervened in almost every area of life, leading some to propose new forms of capital eg ‘emotional capitalism’, and others to suggest that processes of valuation are now the major method for understanding the social world. Whilst, no doubt, capital behaves according to its own logic, finding new lines of flight, converting affects into value, making multi-culturalism marketable, generating new forms of bio-capital, and making many of our actions subject to the logic of calculation, this project asks if anything is left behind. Is there anything that cannot be capitalized upon? Many social theories reproduce the logic of capital. But if we only understand the world from the perspective of this logic what do we miss seeing? My previous research projects have drawn attention to how values are formed beyond value, unnoticed and unseen, producing new ways of being and doing in the world, organized differently through spatial and temporal co-ordinates. This project consolidates and expands this analysis by exploring values (and their relationship to value) through two limit cases that attempt to convert all values to value: modern digital relations and traditional prosperity theology.

My books have included:

Feminist Cultural Theory: Production and Process. (edited). Manchester. Manchester University Press. 1995. (0-7190-4471-5). Now out of print, this book brought together a group of feminists working in very different areas such as art history, demonstrations, advertising and film to show how they approached their subject/objects. It was a methodological challenge that produced some interesting findings about how we are produced by disciplines as much as we produce them.

Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (single authored monograph) Theory, Culture and Society series. London. Sage. 1997. (0-7619-5511-9). This is the one written with passion and commitment after a long ethnographic study. I think it works because it combines the doings and sayings of young women with an understanding of their historical material circumstances to engage with theoretical understandings of gender and class. Its central focus is the performance of respectability as a source of value. An issue that is likely to remain important for some time.

Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism (edited, with S. Ahmed, C. Lury, M. McNeil, J. Kilby) London. Routledge. 2000. (0-415-22066-1). This book came from an amazing conference organized by Lancaster Women’s Studies in the 1990s (three of the editors Celia Lury, Sara Ahmed and me moved to Goldsmiths). The book and the conference included Donna Haraway, Gayatri Spivak, Laurent Berlant and Elspeth Probyn. It is still relevant to contemporary debates with some stunning chapters.

Series editor of Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism. London. Routledge. (2000- currently 10 books published). Check the Routledge website. I’m still really proud of this series which has produced some incredibly important feminist monographs.

Class, Self and Culture. (single authored monograph) London. Routledge. (2004)(0-415-30085-1). This book became a study of the middle-classes, which was not its original intention. It is a study of how the ‘subject of value’ is made, in opposition to the subject that signals the limits for all that is good and proper. It attempts to merge moral understandings of personhood –how we grow or shrink as persons - with economic theories of value, through a critique of the self. I’m still developing the framework established here.

Sexuality and the Politics of Violence. (co-authored, with Les Moran, Karen Corteen and Paul Tyrer) London. Routledge. (2004)(0-415-30091-6). We were funded by the ESRC to conduct a study on the sustainability of safe space constituted out of violent social relationships. Our focus was both Manchester’s gay village and Lancaster’s virtual gay space. Using a variety of methods (survey, focus groups, interviews and participant observation) we explored the relationships of violence and space with property and propriety.

Feminism After Bourdieu (edited, with Lisa Adkins) Oxford. Blackwell. (2004). Another conference book, produced after a very successful conference at Manchester. Following in the tradition of key feminist critics of Bourdieu we interrogated his understandings of reflexivity, capital, subjectivity, biography and habitus. We outline what we think he is useful for and where we think he has problems with his explanatory capacity.

I’m currently working on 2 books with Helen Wood which come out of our ESRC project on reality television and class, called ‘The Making of Class through Mediated Ethical Scenarios’. (See http://www.identities.org/). The first is an edited collection (Reality TV and Class, published by BFI/Palgrave, 2011) which brings together international contributors to explore how class works across national formations, such as the challenges of incorporating reality television into post-socialist economies, which presents some interesting challenges. Other chapters explore affects of shame, pride and aspiration, offering new ways to think about how television moves us, what it does to us and what we do with it.

The second is a jointly authored book of the project called 'Reacting to Reality Television: Audience, performance, value' (published by Routledge) which develops our research findings. It uses empirical evidence to investigate the impact of reality TV within a broader moral economy. We use multi-methods: textual analysis, interviews, text in action viewing sessions and focus groups with four groups of women to investigate media responses. We also developed a new method for TV analysis 'the affective textual encounter' which enabled us to detail exactly where the television incited responses, and describe how these reactions were usually converted into moral judgement. We argue that reality television is restructuring our knowledge of intimacy through its spectacular visualizaton and the call for people to perform their own value on a public stage. We show media effects and affects to be almost opposite to most media understandings of reception.

To celebrate 100 years of the journal The Sociological Review http://www.keele.ac.uk/socrev/, a conference was organised in 2009 from which emerged a series of journal edition on the state of the contemporary sociological imagination. Joanna Latimer and me are finalizing an edition on the politics of the sociological imagination to be published in 2011, with a great range of articles.

Contributions To Refereed Journals:

It feels odd to have such an ‘old’ list but what it reveals is a trajectory that has developed over time, always interested in politics and value.